Cartooned!

Over the holidays, we traveled to see Amy’s mom in Richmond, VA, to see her dad in Charleston, WV and got to see my parents before and after our east coast trip as they came out to Seattle for the holidays. It was a lot of traveling, but one of the things we managed in between family time was to see some friends in Richmond.

One of the couples we got to spend some time are Amy’s best friend from forever Eva and her husband William. They live in Philly but they were visiting family in Richmond as well. We saw them twice and talked at length about what was going on in our various lives. Somehow, one of hiking trips Amy and I took some years ago came up, as we encountered an unusually dressed person on the trail that day. William found this extremely entertaining, and he portrayed our story today on his illustrated blog.

Backstory: For what it’s worth, the hike when this occured was on June 11, 2006 when we hiked up Sunrise Mountain towards Scorpion Mountain. That day we got chased off the mountain by a thunderstorm, so we started hiking back to the car after a satisfactory lunch near the top of Sunrise Mountain. On the way back, I was hiking a little ways in front of Amy and Brendan, and I said hello when I saw someone coming up the trail around a bend. When they got around the bend, I realized that the person was a nude male in his 40’s or so, carrying a backpack. I never made it far enough down to see if he was wearing shoes. I was baffled by his lack of apparel, but continued discussing the weather. “Be careful up there.”, “Oh, don’t worry about me, I think the storm is passing.” as if there was nothing unusual at all. When Amy and Brendan caught up, they were having a harder time containing themselves. We hiked on, certainly out of sight and maybe out of earshot and completely lost it, laughing out loud. We discussed the experience after the fact, and none of us were offended by the encounter, it was just unusual, and funny. I don’t know who we encountered this day, but there is atleast one nude hiker in the Seattle area who has a website where he explains why he choses to hike this way.